Draghi’s Membership in Murky G30 Financial Group Under Fire, by Don Quijones

There’s nothing questionable about this at all. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

A private club for central bankers, regulators, and bankers.

On Wednesday, ECB President Mario Draghi suffered the rare ignominy of being criticized in public by the EU’s Ombudsman, Emily O‘Reilly, whose job it is to arbitrate public complaints about EU institutions. The complaint against Draghi was that he had compromised his public role by regularly attending the Group of 30, a secretive club of corporate and central bankers.

In her response to the complaint, O‘Reilly recommended that Draghi should suspend his membership of the group for the remaining duration of his term.

“The implied closeness of the relationship through membership – particularly between a supervising bank and those it supervises – is not compatible with the independence obligation of an institution such as the ECB,” O’Reilly said.

Previously called the Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs, the Group of 30 (or G30) is a Washington DC-based private group whose members consist of central bank governors, private sector bankers and academics. Membership is by invitation only.

Its current membership list reads like a Who’s Who of global finance. It includes current and former central bankers, many of whom now work or worked in the past for major financial corporations, such as:

Mario Draghi (ECB, Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs)

Ben Bernanke (former Chairman of the Federal Reserve)

William Dudley (New York Fed, Goldman Sachs)

Timothy Geithner (Warburg Pincus, former US Treasury Secretary, New York Fed)

Mark Carney (Bank of England, Bank of Canada, Goldman Sachs)

Axel Weber (UBS, ECB, Bundesbank)

Haruhiko Kuroda (Bank of Japan)

Christian Noyer (Bank for International Settlements, Bank of France)

Jaime Caruana (Bank for International Settlements)

Agustín Carstens (Bank for International Settlements, former Chairman of Bank of Mexico)

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